Benevolence
“There is nothing that requires so strict an economy as our benevolence. We should husband our means as the agriculturalist his fertilizer, which if he spread over too large a superficies produces no crop, if over too small a surface, exuberates in rankness and in weeds.” —Colton
An assumption that ends as an assurance
Faith is not so much belief about God as it is total, personal trust in God, rising to a personal fellowship with God that is stronger than anxiety and guilt, loneliness and all manner of disaster. The Christian’s faith in Christ is trust in a Living Person, once crucified, dead, and buried, and now living forevermore. Call it, if you will, an assumption that ends as an assurance, or an experiment that ends as an experience, Christian faith is in fact a commitment that ends as a communion. —Frederick Ward Kates
Wrong
“There is always an easy solution to every human problem–neat,
plausible, and wrong.” —H. L. Mencken
Life in the Spirit
“The essential contrast which Paul paints is between the weakness of the law and the power of the Spirit. For over against indwelling sin, which is the reason the law is unable to help us in our moral struggle (Rom. 7:17, 20), Paul now sets the indwelling Spirit, who is both our liberator now from ‘the law of sin and death’ (Rom. 8:2) and the guarantee of resurrection and eternal glory in the end (Rom. 8:11, 17, 23). Thus the Christian life is essentially life in the Spirit, that is to say, a life which is animated, sustained, directed and enriched by the Holy Spirit. Without the Holy Spirit true Christian discipleship would be inconceivable, indeed impossible.” —John R. W. Stott
Great anecdote, read the whole thing.
I realized that much of American labor is invested in stretching out the task, pacing the work, making it last. Most jobs can probably be done in half the time with half the people. —W. Michael Murphy
Emanation
“The love I bear Christ is but a faint and feeble spark, but it is an emanation from himself: He kindled it and he keeps it alive; and because it is his work, I trust many waters shall not quench it.” —John Newton
Good Spring quote.
The year’s at the spring,
The day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hillside’s dew pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in His heaven–
All’s right with the world!
Outlawing sin
Two thousand years of failure have not taught some reformers that you can’t stop sin by declaring it illegal. Two thousand years have not taught them that you can’t save a man’s soul by force—you can only lose your own in the attempt. Drunkenness and gambling and secularism and lechery—various hopeful churchmen have earnestly tried to outlaw them all; and what is the result? A drunken nation, a gambling nation, a secularist nation, an adulterous nation. And, often, a ruined Church. —Joy Davidman
Beauty
Good nature will always supply the absence of beauty; but beauty cannot supply the absence of good nature. —ADDISON
System of philosophy
“Institutions can never conserve without betraying the movements from which they proceed. The institution is static, whereas its parent movement has been dynamic; it confines men within its limits, while the movement had liberated them from the bondage of institutions; it looks to the past, [although] the movement had pointed forward. Though in content the institution resembles the dynamic epoch whence it proceeded, in spirit it is like the [state] before the revolution. So the Christian church, after the early period, often seemed more closely related in attitude to the Jewish synagogue and the Roman state than to the age of Christ and his apostles; its creed was often more like a system of philosophy than like the living gospel.” —H. Richard Niebuhr
